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Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

Had medical care, education, child care, and housing followed a cost curve similar to food over the last 40 years [1], no one would be complaining. A big reason why those things have become so expensive is because the country chose to make them expensive. Housing had to be a “good investment”. Elite schools were priced for the elite. Health care became a rent seeking operation in far too many ways to count.

It absolutely kills me that the Democrats haven’t brought up immigration as a way to tackle inflation. The left made immigration all about race, but there’s a huge supply side benefit to having more people who are able to produce more goods and services in the country. Immigrants are often the ones who build houses, and look after our sick, children, and elderly. The country would be a better, more affordable place with more people to help out.

[1] https://images.app.goo.gl/N7rBSDDseMyiBTQb8

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Hold up, the costs of all these services you mention does NOT come from labor cost. It comes from a pursuit of profit of investors and owners. While on the other hand your income as a person ONLY depends on the competition you have from other qualified persons.

What does it help if you flood the labor market more than it already is? Prices may go down 20%, but if your salary goes down 50%, does it really help?

The oversupply of labor is the root cause of the problems you mention, not the solution!

> Hold up, the costs of all these services you mention does NOT come from labor cost.

I don't know if that is actually true, but if it is there'd have to be a pretty strong "and who's fault is that?" to ask. Housing is capital intensive, but medical care, education & child care can all be provided with basically nothing but labour and a dash of equipment.

Assuming a fairly free market where people are allowed to compete, anyway. If competition is illegal then whoever has the licenses will charge wages + a lot.

Housing is only capital expensive mostly because of land value, which comes from scarcity. Again, more folks will only raise the cost, since land is in extremely low supply due to NIMBY, regulation, and people sitting on their land as an investment. The actual construction costs are fairly low compared to land prices (e.g., 1 part construction to 2 parts land cost, or worse [1]).

[1]: https://www.urbanismnext.org/news/land-costs-vs-construction...

There is tremendous capital expense in medical care. Extremely highly educated and well trained doctors do not materialize out of thin air. The mechanisms of human bodies is extremely complex, and requires ever more capital as society’s expectations of “healthcare” continue to march upward.

1950s level of healthcare is cheap. 2022 level of medicine, machinery, the R&D to be able to see inside of a body, the thousands of hours of training to read and understand statistics, measurements, and imaging, etc is incalculable.

All sprinkled with a heavy dose of financial liability for all parties involved.

There are similar arguments to be made for childcare and education.

In the context of labour costs vs other costs? Most of that comes in as labour costs. It is paying humans money to spend time doing things. The high prices of healthcare aren't because of the expensive machines; the production of that can be outsourced, they're relatively long-lifed and they don't consume a lot of physical inputs.

The lines get blurry on labor vs capital costs when intellectual property comes into play. But I would model a doctor spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on education and 10 years of their life in the capital column.

You cannot spin them up and down, and for better or worse, that much investment into a person is basically permanent from a country perspective.

The machines also require very highly skilled people to develop, with enormous R&D costs, same as medicines.

Maybe instead of capital costs, it would have been more accurate for me to write that the labor being bought and sold in the 1950s is nowhere near the same labor being bought and sold in 2022.

We have tens of thousand of people who have passed med school and could become doctors if supply wasn't artificially constrained.

>highly educated and well trained doctors do not materialize out of thin air.

Education could be cheaper

For sure, the current process is needlessly lengthy and strenuous and needs to reform. But even with improvements, I expect full fledged doctors to require quite an investment in training.

Have you tried to get any renovation or building done lately? These industries are completely labor constrained, even if the material is affordable, they won’t get to your job until a year and a half from now.

You could afford more labor if you hadn't been sucked dry by cost of capital

No, I can't. Construction workers are making a lot right now, that $50k reno is going to cost $100k now, and...that is with a year or two of waiting (who knows what it will cost when they actually get around to the job!). We need immigration, we simply don't have the talent locally, and Americans don't want to be plumbers or even electricians anymore.

This is the “lump of labor fallacy”. You can’t just talk about supply and demand with labor because people are customers and generate their own demand.

And it certainly does come from labor costs; services like healthcare naturally get relatively even more expensive as everything else becomes more productive, because you have to pay the healthcare workers more to stop them from leaving for more productive industries. (Baumol’s cost disease)

Baumol's cost disease does not apply if there is oversupply of labor.

See again low-skilled workers. Where are the 'rises in pay' for those working at fast-food, supermarket chains, warehouses, etc.?

Also, labor over-supply will only increase since not only immigration, but also automation will compete with workers.

Automation and immigration can be good things, but only if we provide everyone with a basic income to put them in a position where they actually have a choice to work or not.

> Baumol's cost disease does not apply if there is oversupply of labor.

More or less purely a symptom of bad monetary policy the US stopped doing around 2018.

> See again low-skilled workers. Where are the 'rises in pay' for those working at fast-food, supermarket chains, warehouses, etc.?

They have increased significantly above inflation in the last year because we're in a full employment economy. (While other classes may have had pay losses depending on how much they spend on gas/used cars, the lowest quartile definitely hasn't.)

> Also, labor over-supply will only increase since not only immigration, but also automation will compete with workers.

If you noticed, Andrew Yang lost the election. His automation platform was a myth, caused by our previous non-full-employment economy - there is no actual situation where it can destroy jobs. Either it requires inputs, so there is work to do there, or it doesn't, so it's a perpetual motion machine. (You can tell "rich people fire everyone and replace them with robots" can't actually happen because it's basically the plot of The Fountainhead.)

Another interesting theory about the myth is that it's an accounting artifact caused by Moore's law - if we report computer production in units of computation speed, that means each factory worker is producing a zillion 70s computers a second, which makes it look like they've been automated out of a job.

Countries with less immigration and worse age demographics (Russia, China, Japan) may need to develop automation though, since they'll need someone to take care of all of our old people. We will hopefully continue allowing immigration from Africa, soon to be the only region still producing young people.

Australia's point system assures that you don't just let any useless immigrant in but only the ones with qualifications.

In a highly advanced economy even a basic nurse has 4 years of training- and speak the language. We don't just need warm bodies.

Australia is so selective that 30% of the population is immigrants. Which is working for them (because immigration is good) but it's not actually selective.

Most of that training is wasted. Doctors in the US have a lot of training because there's limited spots for residencies so only the top X can make it in, so there's an infinite amount of arbitrary prerequisites added on just to eliminate people.

I worked a short while on a Esta -- not allowed really but the tax office didn't complain -- in SF making more money as a new grad (6k USD/month + housing) than I will ever make where I live.

Later I realized I was acctually wage dumping ...

Make no mistake what would happen if there was a free flow of programmers to the US. "We" will undercut the locals.

Yes, I would make even more money than I already do because I’d sell goods and services to them, and I could address unmet demand from our existing customers.

Surely even under the immigration is bad model, it wouldn’t apply to programmers who can do their work remotely. Our having a Beijing team hasn’t made me less employed.

Sure, I don't really understand how there can be such a pay discrepancy even inside the US for such a remote friendly occupation as programming. So I am not pretending to understand the dynamics.

Entry level jobs would be swamped though. Like for local kids in London when UK was part of the EU. Like half the kids in the union could speak english good enough and many thought it would be cool to work in London. Good luck raising a family on a normal job when compeeting with people that happely live packed in an apartment for some years before bailing the city for raising families themself in their home countries. I know like half a dozen friends who did that.

You wouldn't be living five to an apartment or wishing you weren't if London had sensible housing policy like Tokyo does. Doesn't every single building in the UK need individual planning approval?

Also, London is expensive but the rest of the UK isn't, which by the cheap immigrant logic should mean the rural areas would outcompete them for everything, surely?

As I wrote earlier I have no clue =)

However, I feel like it is way easier to get a job in e.g. London or SF since it is unsubstainable to live there for most people so there is a big churn. In smaller UK villages you can probably live a good life working at Subway doing sandwiches. Not so much in London. So you wont get the small village Subway job becouse the current holder does not quit.

E.g. when I lived in Palo Alto I noticed a big lack of children so I assume you need to be rich to afford living there with them. So newcommers get the newly made parents jobs and so on.

Why do costs of these services rise so rapidly compared to food, as mentioned? Or computers, or cars, etc.? Do these other industries not have "pursuit of profit of investors and owners"?

Something seemed off about your statement, so I went and looked up some data. Gross margins for Anthem Blue Cross [1] are about 15%; they take in $117B in premiums and pay out $102B in benefits. Gross margins for HCA healthcare are better at about 80% ($50B gross profit on $58B in revenue) [2], but net margins aren't much better at 11%. Half of that $50B goes into "selling, general, and administrative" salaries, with much of the rest in "other expenses". By contrast, Google has gross margins of about 50% and net margins of about 30% [3].

I think the real explanation is Baumol's cost disease [4], which does come from labor cost, albeit indirectly. The tech industry is extremely high productivity, which is why they can afford to pay their not-very-numerous employees $500K+/year. But that means that you have to pay people in other industries more to keep them from becoming tech employees. Probably not as much more - programming has pretty high barriers to entry - but more than a middle-class worker used to make. Housing, healthcare, education, and childcare are essential services, which gives them the negotiating leverage needed to pass these labor cost increases along to consumers. Things like manufacturing, food service, and retail are not, which is why those industries are just going bankrupt.

It's not really oversupply or undersupply of labor that matters here. It's productivity. To get prices of housing/healthcare/education/childcare down to reasonable levels, you need to invent ways that one nurse could take care of hundreds of patients, or one teacher could teach tens of thousands of students. This is why things like telemedicine, machine-learning based diagnostics, mRNA vaccines, immunotherapies, MOOCs, online learning, 4-over-1 condos, etc are so appealing to investors. The problem is that these innovations haven't yet proven attractive enough to win in the marketplace, so we're stuck with conventional labor-intensive ways of servicing these industries for the foreseeable future.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ANTM/financials?p=ANTM

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HCA/financials?p=HCA

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/financials?p=GOOG

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

> Half of that $50B goes into "selling, general, and administrative" salaries

And a lot of this overhead cost isn't necessary simply because the system is so horribly broken. And not just on the side of insurance expenses, but also on the benefits payout side. The US system has consistently shown to be more expensive for worse outcomes than other nations' systems.

> To get prices of housing/healthcare/education/childcare down to reasonable levels, you need to invent ways [...]

No you Americans don't need to invent anything new. Americans should just go and look how other countries operate, the typical American Exceptionalism attitude of "no one does anything better than the US" is the biggest problem the country has.

Housing cost is inflated because rural areas are getting depopulated because of rotting infrastructure (e.g. broadband Internet, adequately funded schools, public transport, access to healthcare) and because employers for modern jobs are located in urban areas. Fixing that requires investment in mentioned infrastructure and incentives for companies to provide remote work for people living outside of urban areas. In some areas, foreign dark money and speculation (cough AirBnB) add to the mix, the former can be confiscated (which the US is beginning to do, at least against Russian assets) and the latter banned or at least severely taxed.

Healthcare costs can be fixed by literally copying any of the other Western nations' healthcare model, and by providing access to more MD education to fix the supply side of doctors.

Education costs aren't that inflated (actually, they are often enough so horribly underfunded that schools only run for four days so teachers can go and run side gigs, or teachers having to pay for supplies out of their already poor wages), but if cost savings were to be made there, I'd start with professional school sports teams and by providing food not out of school budgets but out of social services budgets.

Childcare costs... well, there's supply and demand right there. When both parents have to work two or more jobs to barely make rent, they need childcare. A decent minimum wage that provides enough for a single income to live a decent life should fix the demand and knock out a whole lot of other poverty-related side effects in the process.

Childcare is a must if you want an equal society. If a family gets to choose who works, the incentive is toe choose the one that makes most money. By statistics this is by a far margin male. So childcare is the solution to inequality, not a cost. We call it a women trap.

Healthcare has a problem with insurance where the hospitals have to blow up prices to cover costs and give some wriggle room for haggling with the insurance company.

Alternatively, society could combat the "birth trap" by providing legal protections for mothers, like the right to return to their old jobs, protecting them from getting fired during and after pregnancy, providing them with post-natal PTO... just like it's the norm across Europe.

> By statistics this is by a far margin male.

And again, that one can be combatted by society. Mandate opening up wage lists in companies, mandate equal pay for equal work, support unions and collective wage agreements, mandate gender (and other) equality in hiring. All of this is what various European countries do.

> Healthcare has a problem with insurance where the hospitals have to blow up prices to cover costs and give some wriggle room for haggling with the insurance company.

The fact that hospitals have to haggle with insurance companies is mind-blowing on its own, or that they have to cover for un(der)insured people and have to spread out the cost to all actual payers. In Europe, neither of these is a thing.

Well, we are importing those problems here in Europe too. Private practices does surgery that isn't needed because they get more money from the state.

There seems to be a number of standard procedures in USA medicine that doesn't really exist in Europe but the private medical community would be happy to import them.

It doesn't make an equal society, it shifts the inequality outside of the family. It's not more productive to care for somebody else's kid than to care for your own; most parents would argue it's less productive, because they're more attuned to their kids' needs. So you need a certain amount of labor devoted to childcare in any society, and this amount is dependent only on the number of children, not the amount of income or its distribution.

Economy-wide, if a market chooses who works, the incentive is to choose the people who make the most money. The arbitrage here is that if you make over the median income, you can pay someone who makes less than the median income to take care of your kids, keep your high-paying job, and everyone comes out ahead. But if everyone makes the median income, then it'll cost just as much to pay someone to take care of your kids as you make, making it economically unprofitable.

And this is exactly how it plays out in real life. High-income families get a nanny or au pair, who makes a small fraction of what the mother does, but generally does better than she could've in other equivalently-skilled jobs. Middle-income families like teachers end up spending as much on childcare as one spouse makes. Low-income mothers drop out of the workforce when they have a kid, unless they have family help for childcare.

Women today are completely free to make their own choices. As society is finding out they can choose not to have kids. The first time in human history where that is happening. The government needs to make having children worth it.

A lot of these problems that you mention: housing, and education, for example, are actually greatly caused by government intervention into free markets. Governments are adding all sorts of restrictions for building new houses, thus driving the prices up. The federal government is providing guaranteed loans to students for college, so colleges can charge whatever ludicrous price they want knowing that the loan will always be paid, even if the student defaults.

There is a Freakonomics podcast (https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-cities-still-so-exp...) that addresses this head on. Essentially there used to be a lot of cheap housing that was quite unsafe. By making slums illegal we made housing expensive. And the one potential solution to this (building more housing) has been politically unfeasible.

The problem here isn't safety concerns the problem is zoning. Look at Tokyo for example, they are able to build all the time at the highest safety level for earthquakes, etc. Berkley CA for example doesn't allow a lot of different types of buildings. Its not out of safety, its out of rich people not wanting to look at apartment buildings or having their quaint little town turned into high rise apartment complexes.

Tokyo builds a lot because they tear down a lot. The average house will be rebuilt after 30 years. The structure is overhead because the second hand housing market is so small…only the land appreciates and the Japanese are still burned out on the 80s property bubble. Completely different from how it works in the west.

If Tokyo's model was so terrific and worked so well, you'd be able to list lots of cities that emulate it. Instead, you can only point to Tokyo. Their apartments, by the way, are way too tiny for most Western tastes. "A typical three bedroom apartment for a Japanese family would be around 70 sqm (753 sq.ft)." That's smaller than most American 1-bedrooms. Average cost is about 877,000 yen/sq m which is a little bit above $700/sq ft, which isn't exactly cheap, either.

https://www.rethinktokyo.com/blog/zoe-ward-japan-property-ce...

The taste argument is often made, rarely tested.

I prefer revealed preference. Let's build some Tokyo style apartments in NYC, SF, price them at market per sqft and and let's find out if they 'suit western tastes'

Who is "let's" in your scenario? You want to test the waters, with your capital, go right ahead. Just don't ask for taxpayers' money to test your theory.

Let's, means let's remove the code that prevents Americans from building it?

What code? Minimum apartment size in San Francisco is 220 sq ft (previously was 290), so a 70 sq m "Tokyo-style apartment" is well above the minimum.

https://sf.curbed.com/2019/7/12/20691973/san-francisco-avera...

Height restriction? Approval process? Community reviews? Environmental impact studies!?

Singapore also builds lots of housing.

Appartment complexes are zoned out from large parts of America and they are not slums nor unsfe.

I agree, but getting rid of supply restricting regulation isn’t enough.

Edit: I would argue that for healthcare, we would be better off with a fully government run system (though there are other better alternatives too). Humans just aren’t able to make good decisions about healthcare, and markets function nearly as well as they do for something like food, for example.

Things that require labor get relatively more expensive as capital and labor become more abundant. This would be true even without government intervention though that doesn’t help. The below document goes into much more detail.

> WHY ARE THE PRICES SO D*MN HIGH?

> Health, Education, and the Baumol Effect

https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-a...

> The Baumol effect is easy to explain but difficult to grasp.44 In 1826, when Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 was first played, it took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. In 2010, it still took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. Stated differently, in the nearly 200 years between 1826 and 2010, there was no growth in string quartet labor productivity. In 1826 it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output, and it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output in 2010. Fortunately, most other sectors of the economy have experi- enced substantial growth in labor productivity since 1826. We can measure growth in labor productivity in the economy as a whole by looking at the growth in real wages. In 1826 the average hourly wage for a production worker was $1.14. In 2010 the av- erage hourly wage for a production worker was $26.44, approxi- mately 23 times higher in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. Growth in average labor productivity has a surprising impli- cation: it makes the output of slow productivity-growth sectors (relatively) more expensive.

Let's not act like houses would be built properly without these regulations

Housing code and zoning laws are different. Code is what makes sure a house is built "properly": materials, structural requirements, ventilation, septic, etc. Zoning is what ensures how large a parcel size should be, how close the nearest shop can be, and how tall a building can be.

It's a bit sad then. Construction code is meant to rise the level of quality but also lower the cost since manufacturers can match regular quality levels at larger scale (in theory).

In California you pay roughly 75k/SFH in permit fees for new construction just to be approved. That’s before any work on the house starts.

Yeah…

Permits are one thing if they are inevitably granted, and another if they actually limit people's ability to do things: "we'll say no even if you meet standards and can pay".

riot

A corollary is looking at the prices of things that have declined the most. Like software - it's declined to $0.

And it's completely unregulated.

This is just patently false. The company I work for, roughly 200 people, spends roughly $10k/month on software. Personally, I spend maybe $50/month.

$50 a month per employee per month sounds very cheap to me. It rounds to zero considering you’re probably doing things with the software that would be impossible without it. Unless you have astonishingly and uniformly high quality employees you probably couldn’t get to half the quality or efficiency you have with software without it. $50 per person is less than four hours of minimum wage labor per employee.

And yet if you used Linux, the operating system would be free. Linux is very heavily used in industry.

I read now and then about how paid software relies heavily on the free stuff, and how those vendors should donate to the people writing the free stuff.

There's no way we'd be able to use Linux. We might be able to make it work, but we'd be then kissing vendor support goodbye. That's suicide.

I use software that costs $10k+ per seat, every day. I recently reviewed some that was $50k a seat. There are companies that have workforces if hundreds using this software to design our modern world every day. I don't get this comment.

Your boat might be expensive, but it's floating in a sea of free software.

https://www.linux.org/pages/download/

https://www.3ds.com/products-services/catia/

https://www.ansys.com/

https://www.solidworks.com/

Comsole, Matlab, etc.

If you want to do complex product design competitively there is no substitute for software packages like these. Yes, there are open source alternatives, but they are not competitive, not tome efficient for the folks using it (it's cheaper to just buy the commercial packages because they save more than their cost in labor during the design process). If you can spend 10k to get your product to market 2 months quicker, that's a no brainer when your burn rate is millions a month.

I don't disagree with you, but Linux is an enormously complex piece of software.

I also never said all software was free. Of course some software is paid for. But how much of the software you use is free? My bet is quite a bit. Including HackerNews and browser you access it with.

Quite a bit of paid software is built by all free dev tools. This didn't use to be true - good compilers were very expensive. At least a couple grand in modern dollars.

You said “software costs $0” without caveats. Not “some software”. You are now trying to pretend you didn’t take such a hard stance.

It’s ok and good to admit when you say something wrong. I really respect when people do that.

P.S. I’ve been trying to get into less silly arguments like this on the internet… alas I couldn’t help myself here.

Consider "people like ice cream". True or false? It's true even if you reply that your friend Fred doesn't like ice cream.

That's why the word "all" exists. If I meant 100% of people like ice cream, I would have said "100%" or "all" people like ice cream.

This is basic English semantics.

> silly arguments

It becomes a silly argument when one party decides to treat English with an overly literal interpretation as a rhetorical tactic.

Hmmm... I think there is an implicit "most" in these sentences. Most people like ice cream, so I agree it is pedantic to argue that "people like ice cream" is false.

When writing my comment, I guess I had an assumption that most software costs more than $0. After thinking about more, I'm not sure that is true. It think it is probably the case that most software is free to use. Interesting to think about.

However, there is a wrinkle in your analogy, which I think may be a driver of some of the intense debate in this comment thread. It's rare for someone to "hate" ice cream -- I actually can't think of anyone I know who does.

But it's very common to find software that costs A LOT more than $0. So, in a sense, "software costs $0" is much less true than "people like ice cream". As of right now, I think I'm still on the side of it being more false than true. But I'll admit it is more nuanced than I thought.

Regardless, I recant the harshness from my previous comment. Thanks for thoughtfully explaining yourself.

I do agree with another sibling commenter that you could have been clearer in your original statement :)

"Like software - it's declined to $0."

Juxtapose this statement with the one further downthread:

"What do the most ambitious do in the US? Go into software or Wall Street."

How can there be money to be made in something that costs zero dollars. That is a rhetorical question, i.e., no answer is being requested.

But it's not a very good rhetorical question. Money can be made in something that costs zero dollars by harvesting user data and utilizing it correctly, for example to sell ad space, or sell directly to other interested parties. It is literally the strategy of some of the biggest tech companies in the world.

The question evoked exactly the points I wanted to evoke. Not bad for a rhetorical question.

Harvesting user data. Sell ad space. Sell user data to interested parties. This as a "strategy". Biggest "tech" companies.

Thank you.

Is this practice really best-described as "software". Is the (free) software merely a Trojan Horse for something else.

The commenter could have written "What do the most ambitious do in the US? Go into harvesting personal data from people's use of computers and online ad sales, or Wall Street."

This would have been more accurate in terms of describing the money-making aspect.

Oops, I interpreted it the other way around, that you can't make money off something that is free because you don't take any money for it. My bad.

My Ubuntu box I use for development has all free software on it. Operating system, compilers, browser, presentation editor, all the stuff I use.

All free.

I also develop and give away open source software. The money I make from it is doing things like training and support.

I bet you use Google, Youtube, Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Hackernews, all kinds of software web services for free.

All this free stuff, much of it best in breed, was inconceivable when I started in software.

I think this guy is a troll... Take a look through his comment history. He's prolific, but seems inclined to say ridiculous stuff to get under people's skins.

I bet you use a ton of free software. Like the browser you used to post your comment.

You can download a lot of software I wrote for free:

https://github.com/digitalmars

> but seems inclined to say ridiculous stuff to get under people's skins

My views aren't mainstream, but they are honest views.

This is not true I spend $350 per month on my hackernews subscription. (sarcasm)

Neither of those statements is true... Are games priced at $0? Will Amazon give you AWS for free? Do Apple and Google let you use all their mobile apps for free?

Sure, FOSS is a thing... but plenty of software ain't FOSS.

Re: regulation... Plenty of software is regulated by law. Ever heard of PCI compliance? Banking? Insurance? Tax prep? Medicine? Military? Flight avionics? ... All of those industries are heavily regulated by law, and some ofbthose regulations govern their software, too.

> Are games priced at $0?

Plenty are, like the one I wrote:

https://classicempire.com/

Doom, one of the most famous and played games of all time, is also free.

https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/doom/

> AWS

is a hardware service.

> Do Apple and Google let you use all their mobile apps for free?

Do you see the word "all" in your sentence? I didn't say "all". You modified what I wrote.

> All of those industries are heavily regulated by law

And the software under those regulations is expensive. See a pattern there?

Most game are not priced at zero... And games are definitely not a regulated part of the software industry in America.

Also, your original statements are both phrased in a way that implies "all". You failed to qualify blanket statements by saying (e.g.) "some". So if you don't want to admit you're wrong, fine: You're doing a poor job of communicating your thoughts.

As to evidence of that, just count the number of replies you got that came to the same conclusion I did about an implied "all" versus an implied "some".

Not like it matters, anyway... The counter-example if games alone pretty much kills your whole argument about regulation being correlated with higher prices.

I think you are clearly a very smart person, and a very good programmer, who is suffering from the Dunning Krueger Effect in relation to the topic of Economics. Regulation can effect costs, but it's far from the only factor, and it's not even necessarily an important factor depending on the situation.

> Most game are not priced at zero...

Most games in a retail setting, sure. But there are plenty of online free games, more than you can count.

> an implied "all" versus an implied "some".

The absence of a modifier means "in general", not "some". C'mon, this is basic English. You know it, I know it.

> The counter-example if games alone

Neither you nor I have any idea how many free games are out there.

> Regulation can effect costs, but it's far from the only factor

I didn't say it was the only factor. Sheesh. I'd prefer you stop inserting words into what I wrote to create a strawman.

Not to nitpick, but the "free" version of Doom is the shareware version, which contains only one episode (out of three in original game and four in ultimate doom). And the shareware version was always free, even during it's original launch in 1994.

I think these days a better example are free to play games such as League of Legends or Call of Duty Warzone, which can be played for years without paying a dollar.

There is no such thing as a free market under capitalism only a capitalistic market. Yet you are here and are complaining about the capitalistic market. Governments are giving all sorts of concessions to capitalists namely the homeowners and real estate corporations. The latter benefit from the democratic legitimacy that the former give them.

Homeowners are better described as feudalist; their value appreciation doesn’t come from capital investment (although they pretend it does), it comes from hoarding land, which is the only thing you can hoard since you can’t make any more of it.

Unfortunately everyone read Marx instead of Henry George and so we’re stuck talking about two factors of production instead of three.

I am baffled. Immigration "tackles" inflation by driving down working-class wages. That benefits the upper-middle class.

And also, driving up the rent and increasing traffic.

I'm in agreement here. I really dont understand why people think immigrants help the middle class.

Only people in upper class believe that more "low skilled" labor will help the middle and lower class.

Take Jeff Bezos. He doesn't like to pay salaries to warehouse employees, but his employees will not give up the few dollars per hour that keep them from starving and homelessness.

Now, we flood the "low skilled" labor market. What if there are twice as many workers available? Sure, someone will be willing to swap unemployment for a job with a somewhat lower salary?

Now, instead of companies competing with each other for labor... we have workers competing with each other for jobs! That's fantastic news for the upper class! They will work for peanuts, because otherwise they'll starve and have to live in a car in a poor neighborhood... checkmate!

No such thing as competing for jobs necessarily, because you can’t run out of jobs as long as there’s demand. More people = more businesses = more demand. (If immigrants made you poorer then so would your neighbors having children, and the way to get richer would be killing your coworkers.)

Thinking you can run out of jobs is an artifact of the US’s bad monetary/industrial policy from 2000-2020, but if you look around you’ll see that’s over. We’re in a full employment economy now.

> as long as there’s demand.

So how could we generate more demand?

The point is humans generate their own demand. We can new immigrant family in turn is buying all sorts of things.

you generate demand by having money to pay for things

It has at most a small and transitory negative effect on a very small portion of the writing class. The average worker benefits. If we want to help the lowest paid we can reduce they’re taxes or subsidise their wages.

https://fullfact.org/immigration/immigration-and-jobs-labour...

> UK research suggests that immigration has a small impact on average wages of existing workers but more significant effects for certain groups: low-wage workers lose while medium and high-paid workers gain.

The wage effects of immigration are likely to be greatest for resident workers who are immigrants themselves.

Research does not find a significant impact of overall immigration on unemployment in the UK, but the evidence suggests that immigration from outside the EU could have a negative impact on the employment of UK-born workers, especially during an economic downturn.

The impacts of immigration on the labour market depend on the skills of migrants, the skills of existing workers, and the characteristics of the host economy. This means that research evidence on the labour market effects of immigration is always specific to time and place.

For both wages and employment, short run effects of immigration differ from long run effects: any declines in the wages and employment of UK-born workers in the short run can be offset by rising wages and employment in the long run.

The lowest paid already pay effectively no taxes and your suggestion is to have them pay less?

Do you understand the incentives you're creating when you have only a small minority of productive people subsidize everyone else?

> The lowest paid already pay effectively no taxes and your suggestion is to have them pay less?

Yes. I believe that being poor is miserable and that we should make the lives of our fellow citizens less miserable. I don’t see any need not to attach strings to it either. There’s nothing morally wrong with saying you have to be a net tax payer to vote, for example.

> Do you understand the incentives you're creating when you have only a small minority of productive people subsidize everyone else?

It’s not a small minority though. A small minority of people make the most money but something near a majority of people who work for money are net tax payers over their life. The magnitude of their contribution varies enormously but I’d be shocked if most people who work 30 years or more aren’t net tax payers.

That's a bad way to see it. First of all, proportionally they pay quite a lot of taxes because all their money goes into consumption. Depending on where you live, VAT can be up to 25% for example. Also, they are subjected to payroll taxes and other things, so it's wrong to focus solely on income tax here.

But more importantly, it absolutely makes sense to have the poorest be subsidized by the richest. That's what Europe does, and they are doing great. I would much rather be taxed highly in Europe and know that the money is making sure everyone around me has healthcare and a roof above their head than thinking that my productivity is some God-given ability that supersedes a compassionate and rational way to structure society.

> It absolutely kills me that the Democrats haven’t brought up immigration as a way to tackle inflation.

What we need is wage inflation to readjust prices and you're talking about how to continue to keep wages suppressed, which would not help the people who have fallen out of the middle class.

Immigration isn't going to decrease the prices of housing, except for providing cheap labor, which is just exploitation.

I actually agree with more permissive immigration standards (because ultimately I believe in a world without borders and free movement of people that we need to get to eventually), but you're trying to cheap immigrant labor as a club against the working class to keep prices down. That is an upper class concern.

At this point wages must rise so that people can afford things again, or else the massive decades-long asset bubble really needs to fall. And its possible that we do have a worker shortage now caused by the effects of the pandemic which are going to allow workers to have bargaining power. That kind of inflation is what we desperately need, and trying to prevent it via importing cheap labor is an argument that the elite would make.

And this is likely to be an actually extraordinarily unpopular opinion on this forum. Everyone is terrified of inflation and is about to explain to me why a wage-price spiral would be terrible for everyone and hurt the working class (but as long as wage inflation outpaces commodities inflation and asset bubbles in housing that is good in the long run for the working person, while all other roads are just terrible pain for workers short term and long term). That's why I think the central bank will throw the brakes on hard at some point and pop the asset bubble and create a truly massive economic crash (unless other policy measures suffice to get wage inflation back under control again, like dramatically increased immigration).

Adding more labor would drive down demand and hurt wages even more. This is econ101 stuff. The Democrats are working for the elite class now just look at how they backed the "working class" truckers

Economists don’t agree with this because they took the classes after 101 ;)

Supply and demand models aren’t used for labor because they don’t fit, because people generate their own demand. It’s better to look at search and monopsony models instead - but more importantly, they make the models and change their minds after observing real world data, which is why surveys of economists say immigration and minimum wage laws etc. are good.

Adding more people to a country means there’s more demand, because there’s more people, and people demand stuff. This is also Econ 101 stuff. Consider that as America’s population boomed between, say, 1860 and 1960, from 30M to 150M, instead of everyone becoming 5X poorer as they split the pie among more people, the country got vastly richer and more prosperous - the pie got bigger.

You need money to have demand. 5 billion broke people creates zero demand. You can't just dilute the labor pool and claim you're strengthening the mixture. You're just adding more options for the employer which means less positions for you

Housing can be a good investment or insurance, but you need to tax those that own properties they don't use to live in. Otherwise housing will get to a price beyond its real worth when people look for ways to invest their liquid assets. We had negative interest rates for government bonds... And renting out has quite the good returns, in my country it is a complete industry that exploits people that need to rent because they just don't have any capital.

Nobody should ever rent because it does not build capital. It can be a sensible solution if you actually do have a lot of capital. I doubt that is too widely spread.

Immigration can be positive or negative for the lowest income class. They don't have the expectations of the domestic population and can severely decrease income in low-income jobs and they increase competition here. "They build houses" is not really too realistic in my opinion. It is mostly beneficial for the better off classes that actually can pay for care.

Sure, the middle class does benefit from cheap labor which immigration provides... But not to the degree large capital owners do.

> The country would be a better, more affordable place with more people to help out

So in other words, a constantly growing population.

in a finite space with finite resources.

I see a problem here.

I'm pro immigration, "free movement of goods and labor" is a basic human right. I'm more pessimistic about our whole economic system which is built on the assumption of a growing population.

Economic growth means nothing except that you trade money faster. It doesn’t use more resources - actually it uses less as you transition from goods to services.

The US uses less of many resources than it did in the 60s, and that’s still true if you account for offshoring.

I am going to need a source to believe that the consumption of a country of 180M in 1960 is less than the consumption of a country of 330M in 2022.

Just looking at changes in life expectancy and the amount of resources consumed in the final years/months/days of life in 1960 vs 2022 would lead mento throw out the claim.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-...

https://www.treehugger.com/more-trees-than-there-were-years-...

Resources aren’t used per person, and having more working people gives us more brainpower, the only thing that can invent ways to use less of them.

It was probably the worst when we’d just invented industrialization, yes; we were still nearly Malthusian but also had horribly polluting wood and coal fires everywhere. Technology improvements have let us move away from that.

I cannot read the Bloomberg link, but I think fossil fuel usage is a better proxy of total resource consumption than trees.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...

I am betting the above chart does not incorporate all the manufacturing activity that was outsourced from 1960 to 2022.

I like to think of it in terms of basic physics. Consumption = energy = mass * distance. The more mass that is moving more distance, the more “resources” has to be consumed. Perhaps not in the form of trees, but at the end of the day, the reduction in entropy has to be made up somewhere.

So you have more people, moving more mass (including themselves), means more resources consumed. Materials becoming lightweight does help, technology obviating and consolidating devices of course helps, and efficiency gains in energy conversion mechanisms helps too.

But I doubt those advancements have offset increases in living standards and expectations of qualify of life. And a lot of people around the world are stepping up their consumption big time, and they are not even close to reaching 1960s level of American lifestyle, much less 2022.

> I cannot read the Bloomberg link, but I think fossil fuel usage is a better proxy of total resource consumption than trees.

Replaced it with Substack.

Yearly CO2 emissions are down since 1990 excluding consumption, including that it's a bit up but the recent trend is good. Water and other things are flat including consumption/outsourcing.

But that also shows the issue - transportation emissions aren't caused by having a lot of people! They're caused by land use regulations. More people with sensible density means more close by destinations you don't have to drive to.

(Note the climate change issue is cumulative CO2, not that emissions are actually going up.)

> But that also shows the issue - transportation emissions aren't caused by having a lot of people!

Perhaps so technically, but not practically. Space itself is a resource, and people want space. More people means more space consumption. And that has always been the US’s great luxury. Lots of desirable space per person, in conjunction with low fossil fuel prices.

And while one can theorize about how densely people can and should live together, the reality is it will be politically unpopular if the population has an option (i.e. is not too poor to have to live super densely). Notwithstanding one’s 20s when a tiny apartment in a dense urban core satisfies one’s desires.

Eventually, that expectation of quality of life always gives out to the luxuries of space and individual cars.

> Elite schools were priced for the elite.

Note that most people don't go to elite schools. In particular, the middle class (almost by definition) doesn't go to elite schools.

Agreed on the immigration: the Democrats had a great opportunity to go against the Republicans and solve our labor shortages at the same time (they aren’t the problem, they are the solution!). Whenever I see homeless camps and compare them to the people who used to line up in front of Home Depot looking for jobs, the latter was much more appealing than the former.

Do you think the latter somehow makes the former disappear?

No, not at all. Those people in the camps are incapable of doing any kind of work, really: you can't show up high on drugs or drunk to work and expect it to work out. The people at homedepot, they aren't documented, but they want to work.

Haha I would love to hear how the left made immigration all about race as opposed to the right.

All the left is, is identity politics. That's why you elected a rich old senile white dude to head your patriarchy

I feel like the left has historically been simply pro immigration, and then somehow race was brought into the conversation. I won't name the party I think responsible.

One party believes that if you are a certain race you should vote uniformly the same way "or you ain't black". At it's core, these are people who think other races are "too stupid" to be self-sufficient and would much rather have a steady stream of dependent people to use for support

>I feel like the left has historically been simply pro immigration, and then somehow race was brought into the conversation. I won't name the party I think responsible.

Simply false. Historically, US labor unions were anti-immigration because of competition for their own members already in the country. Go look up Cesar Chavez's view on allowing more Mexicans (especially illegal aliens) in to compete against his United Farm Workers. Unions being for unlimited, uncontrolled entry from outside the US is a very recent phenomenon.

The left wasn't pro immigration back when they were the party of workers.

Which part of "identity politics" was it when Biden got on national television to tell everyone he wanted to fund, not defund, the police?

Incoherent and politically illiterate rants like yours aren't really appropriate.

Democrats have better party discipline than Republicans do, but that leads to weird outcomes like the people who most distrust the police voting for the author of the crime bill. There seems to be a tacit understanding that elections are for a political machine and not an individual person, so Biden can poll poorly and would still get votes.

"political machine and not an individual person" Not true at all for Republicans ie Trump vs Neocons. Trump became bigger than the political machine that originally wanted Jeb.

Every time Trump talked about illegal immigration, the left said he was talking about all immigration, and then that being against all immigration was because he was racist.

I'm a left-voting Brit and I can see that. The endless accusations by the left US media, politicians, and activists of people being -ist has caused massive credibility damage. Not to mention, they have significantly devalued the real victims of genuine cases of -ism.

Sounds a bit unhealthy to pay attention to him from over there? Especially since he was lying - illegal immigration to the US stopped around 2007 and has been negative since. This doesn’t stop people from complaining about it, most people’s political options are 5-10 years behind reality.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-02-21/the-my... (not sure if you can see that but don’t have a better link)

> Sounds a bit unhealthy to pay attention to him from over there?

What does this mean?

Don't you have a PM with even worse hair to be reading news about?

As in I shouldn't ask you what you mean, because I should be doing that instead? I'm confused.

Every time Trump talked about illegal immigration, it was a nativist dog whistle.

Anti-immigration dog whistling has been a fairly standard tactic for right wing politicians since the 90s, where John Howard referred to asylum seekers as illegals, railed against "queue jumpers", and called for immigrants to respect the "Australian way of life" [1]. Like Trump, Howard also constantly went on about how he represented "ordinary Australians", unlike the "elites" with their "vested interests".

[1] https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12...

I know it was described that way, but I also remember a lot of legal immigrants getting very frustrated at illegal immigration, and even more frustration at left-leaning media constantly reclassifying any mention of illegal immmigration as referring to any immigration.

To me it seems like a category error, and I can't believe it's an accidental one. Some people do some things that we agree on are okay. Some go too far. That doesn't mean all do.

Slightly more broadly, I think there's a healthy discussion to be had on open borders, and whether immigration should be illegal at all, but constantly assuming someone means something they aren't saying is incredibly destructive to our ability to reason about topics.

> The left made immigration all about race

This is some weird gaslighting.

Because exploiting foreigners to work all the tough low-paid jobs that nobody wants to do is how we created racial disparities to begin with...

I am fully on board with more immigration. A LOT more. But I don't think it would solve those problems you rightly point out.

I do think it would solve issues like entitlement insolvency. And also just generally increase our tax base.

Immigrants are net positive on the economy.

The policies are firmly steeped in racism. Just look at Ukraine. People from below our border have also been facing hell. Not as large scale or with big booms. But more sadistic and vicious.

Housing and pay diverged because we opened the border in the middle of the last century: supply for labor went way up along with demand for housing and other essential services. Combine that with some poor decisions by the Fed and you have high inflation with low wages. I don't know why you think immigration would have any other effect, the results have been extremely clear if you look at historical data.

1,041,570 people became legal permanent residents in 1910 and 1,031,765 did the same in 2019. What are you talking about 'flood gates' ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...

Yes, note how the immigration diverges from the domestic population growth in the late 60s, the same time house price growth diverges from wage growth.

>What are you talking about 'flood gates' ?

You tell me, I didn't write that.

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